Mplayer as default DVD player in KDE 4

I got a thing for MPlayer. There’s a good number of video players in Linux but the simplicity of MPlayer has always made it what I like to use. I like to use MPlayer without the GUI because once I learned the keybindings it makes for fast and bare-bones video player (to learn a little more about setting up MPlayer settings, look at this page). To be able have MPlayer as your default video player in KDE 4 you’ll have to do change mime associations and add MPlayer to the ‘Open with’ dialog.

Changing mime Associations

If you install MPlayer with a GUI, you can skip this step because it should install an icon and .desktop file (file for displaying in the Application menu and listing associated file types). If you install MPlayer without a GUI, likely it will not have one. Here’s a ‘mplayer.desktop’ file you can use:

Open ‘System Settings’ (or whatever your distribution calls it), click on the Advanced tab and choose File Associations. Then select video in ‘Known types’. Go through videos you’d like MPlayer to open as default and place MPlayer at the top of the list then ‘Apply’. Note, you may have to wait a minute after doing the previous action before the mime types get registered. Now videos that you have saved on you hard drive can be clicked and loaded with MPlayer.

Mplayer in ‘Open with’ Dialog

Adding to Device Actions in System Settings

It may be faster and quicker to copy and paste the configuration file I post in the next step. I put this method up is case you want to learn how to add and configure special device actions.

Open ‘System Settings’ and go to the Advanced tab and click on Device Actions. ‘Add’ a new action named ‘MPlayer’. Add a new action like: ‘mplayer dvdnav://’. Most distributions compile MPlayer with DVD navigation now so this should work. Remove ‘The device must be of the type Storage Volume’ and ‘The devices property Storage.Volume.ignored must equal false’ properties. Select ‘All of the contained conditions must match’ then click ‘Add’.

Requirement type: Contains Other Requirements
Requirement type: Is A Requirement

Save the configuration and you should see the ‘Open with’ dialog display MPlayer. For me this didn’t though and I ended up creating the configuration manually and only then did it show up after I rebooted. Rebooting should be necessary though and likely this step would have worked if I had just logged out and back in again. I had been playing with the configuration a bit before I learned how to do this and likely this is a bug in system settings. If this doesn’t work for you look at the alternative below.

Using a Pre-made Configuration

Use this pre-built configuration if you don’t want to do the above and put it in the right directory to have MPlayer appear in the ‘Open with’ dialog:

Welcome to linuxtidbits.

linuxtidbits is a place for common bits of Linux knowledge. Linux is a good operating system with good people. Being part of Linux, to me, means being a part of something that everyone can contribute to.